This is an incredible debate with loads of blame flying around and responsibility appearing to stick nowhere without generating much further debate. In all these discussions, everyone is taking the word of the pilot that he meant to ditch.
What if he didn't mean to ditch?
Let's all face it, the pilot continued on this flight with the information he had to hand, and for one reason or another, he made the decision very early that he was going to land at Norfolk Island. The pilot did land, and it was clearly not quite in the way he expected. Much of the debate is therefore about when he should have made some other decision that he (also clearly) did not make. And of course the follow on to that is who should be responsible for decisions made or not made.
Maybe, in this case, the ATSB and CASA are actually just being polite?
In this case the pilot, having done much planning (regardless of whether it was flawed or not), had a fuel panic, done some instrument approach work, made decisions about not descending below minima or converting to a home made GPS approach, he then decided to fly out over the water and crash...and didn’t really tell anyone about it. Specifically, he didn’t mention it to the Unicom operator.
Does that really sound plausible?
We have all seen situations in aviation where a certain outcome makes an individual create a seemingly plausible explanation as to how they got to where they were in order to make it seem as though they had a plan.
He may have said something inside the cabin as a precautionary measure, but judging by the earlier decisions, and especially the one to continue to NI and land, it seems much more likely that in the end he was over water looking for a cloud break and quite simply found himself in the water.
I have heard of that happening several times before, but in my time I have never heard of anyone trying a controlled, powered ditching at night before...especially when there is a well lit and instrumented runway nearby.
Most aeroplanes when performing instrument approaches successfully manage to descend below the minimum descent altitude without hitting anything, so it stands to reason if he simply tried a stabilised approach using any instrument procedure the chances were good that he would have made it to the runway. If he had done that, there would be no ditching and no story.
Similarly, it has been brought up in this thread that people talk about descending over the sea to get a cloud break if all else fails using traditional instrument approach methods.
In my experience, low altitude over water can be extremely difficult, especially when associated with night, poor visibility, low cloud and rain. In those conditions, the risk of flying into the sea due to lack of awareness and disorientation is high.
We are now really just discussing an unfortunate and unplanned outcome to what could have been a complete non-story. Doesn’t really matter who is right or wrong anymore. The aeroplane is lost and everyone survived. That’s lucky!